> From: Rob Davies <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Actually that brings up a point why the camera manufacturers with the > advent of large files and bandwidth size have not adapted Firewire > 800. Would rectify a few problems especially with the VTR's for HD > coming online and the troubles Panasonic and Apple are having with > the AJ-HD1200A.
Sadly if the CEO of Weibetech (a Firewire hard disk manufacturer) is correct (see link and excerpt below), Apple may be deprecating it's commitment to Firewire 800 and possibly heading in the direction of SATA bus technologies for external as well as internal connections. It is hard to imagine that Firewire 400 won't stick around with so much video gear using it - but at least for future external hard drives, it sounds like Firewire 1600 and 3200 may just be pipe-dreams. Perhaps that is why Firewire 800 still hasn't made it down to the iMac or into video gear and perhaps why Apple hasn't fixed the performance problems with Firewire 800: http://www.barefeats.com/fire47.html Who knows which way it will go? :-( -Mart --------------------- http://www.wiebetech.com/pressreleases/firewireevolution.pdf "While FireWire 800 was originally promoted by Apple, SATA has quietly won the entire rest of the market. FireWire promoters didn¹t pay it serious attention, because SATA didn¹t have an approved connection methodology for the support of external drives. It didn¹t appear to be competition for FireWire (or USB2, for that matter) but it is the biggest competition that¹s out there. SATA enclosures don¹t need to have additional bridging silicon within them. SATA drives are happy to directly connect to a host SATA port. This reduces overhead in every sense of the word, and reduces costs as well. SATA connectors function perfectly fine at 1.5Ghz and soon at 3.0Ghz as well, and do not have the steep cost associated with them, unlike FireWire 800 connectors, silicon, and cables. The SATA architecture has been improved to support, in hardware, multiple drives through one connection port. This will allow very large capacity storage devices to come to market, at lower costs than FireWire. I expect to see these kinds of devices soon. When it comes to reducing costs and increasing performance, Apple¹s no fool. I believe that Apple will continue to increase its use of SATA devices within and outside of its computer systems, simply because the costs of doing so are lower than implementing FireWire 1600 or FireWire 3200, SATA II will do it better, and Apple will have the opportunity to use this as a competitive industry advantage, just like it originally tried to use FireWire 800. While Apple has occasionally been a reluctant follower of pervasive industry standards (for instance, USB 2 was only adopted by Apple last year), my impression is that it is getting smarter in this respect. The argument boils down to this: It¹s a prudent business decision for Apple to use a lot more SATA, including external SATA II storage. What else is there? What could be lower in cost? What would offer a better benefit to the consumer? The answer: nothing else is out there at this point in time."
